2513 Jackson Rd
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
USA
Nancy Chen Long is a 2017 NEA Creative Writing fellow, is author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. You’ll find her newer work inNinth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, Zone 3, Briar Cliff Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned an MFA. She works in Research Technologies at Indiana University.
Christine Rhein is the author of Wild Flight, a winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry (Texas Tech University Press). Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, includingThe Gettysburg Review and The Southern Review, and have won awards from Michigan Quarterly Review and Green Mountains Review. Her work has also been selected for Poetry Daily, The Writer’s Almanac,Best New Poets 2007 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017. A former automotive engineer, Christine lives in Brighton, Michigan.
Books:
Light into Bodies
Taken as a whole, Light into Bodies grapples with issues of identity, the fluid and evolving nature of identity, and how identity can be contextual. It explores individual identity and how that identity changes through time and influence. The book is divided into three parts. The first section inhabits the landscape of childhood, that of a biracial, multiethnic child as she grapples with understanding the world and her place in it based on what she sees and what she’s been taught. The second section moves from childhood and family-of-origin into the world of the adult: relationships, marriage, divorce, and expectations of identity and behavior based on relationship roles. The third section opens up to the larger world and identity in that world, societal expectations and assumptions with respect to identity, the concept of home, memory and time, origins and creation. Recurring juxtapositions of sometimes seemingly disparate things, such as science and religion, myth and math, East and West, coupled with a mix of various poetic forms and styles, strive to work against the declaration of a monolithic identity. The book ends with a nod to the idea that we are multi-dimensional with multiple identities, to the idea that identity is a personal journey and that we have a right and an obligation to identify our own selves.
Wild Flight
Soaring across extensive terrain, from the working world of Detroit to American suburbia and pop culture, from the European landscape of World War II to the current war in Iraq, Christine Rhein opens her personal world to the world at large. In poems that explore the historical, social, and scientific as well as the poignant and humorous, Rhein relishes life’s juxtapositions.
